Research Strains
Temporal Patterns of Communication in the Workplace
Today's workers are expected to be adept at the usage of multiple communication mediums. With secretaries now regarded as a frivolous luxury, people have essentially become professional secretaries of their own interactions. A large body of research has examined how information workers have appropriated a particular communication medium to accomplish work competently. My research, however, seeks to characterize the multifarious nature of modern information work and their affects on workers' mental states. To accurately represent real-life behavior, I use the shadowing method to collect data: meeting the informant at the beginning of the workday and following them as closely as possible, recording to the second events as they occur, till the end of business. Each informant is followed for 3 whole work days (about 24 hours in total).
How do people combine and integrate a multitude of media adroitly throughout a limited workday (about 8 hours)? We have examined the phenomenon of communication chains, interactions (face-to-face, instant messaging, phone, and email) that occur one after another in rapid succession.
How do employees manage the increased variety of people one is expected to contact in the workplace? Following the grounded theory methodology, we developed the workplace connector construct to categorize the diverse groups of relationships workers must continually contact and/or maintain. This allows us to get a better grasp of describing the multitasking of people.
Currently, we are examining how to measure the temporal regularity, or routineness, of information work as well as carry out ethnomethodological analyses of media combos (combinations of communciation mediums to accomplish particular types of work). We are also identifying archetypes of workdays across workers based on daily temporal patterns.
Knowledge Management Practitioners in the Aerospace Industry
Knowledge management (KM) is a field that straddles both academic and industry spheres. It is also a controversial field. For the past three years, my colleagues and I have been participant observers of a community of KM practitioners from the aerospace industry. This group (which also includes academics and a few other industries such as power) meets together quarterly, rotating locales amongst their companies, to talk about KM. Thus far, we have focused on two aspects of this community:
How is it that practitioners of KM seek to legitimize their field in the corporate world? Drawing from science and technology studies and the sociology of scientific knowledge, we examined the disciplinary rhetoric of KM practitioners. Through interviews and observations, we deconstructed the shoptalk of KM practitioners. KM is brought forth as a progressive yet grounded discipline through legitimization strategies such as forming a symbiotic relationship with academics, and differentiating themselves from the “outmoded” IT discipline.
What challenges do these KM practitioners face in their self-described community of practice? Drawing from social worlds theory, we wrote on how power structures are transferred and maintained from an individual's social world to the community. This highlights the challenges of when attempting to form a good community of practice.
Currently, we are doing a historical analysis of how the term community of practice has evolved from academia to business.
Nomadic Work
Nomadic work is an extreme form of mobile work. Nomadic workers travel most of the time, are not strongly associated with a single home office, and are constantly configuring their resources. Companies are increasingly transforming their workforce into a nomadic one to cut cost (they don't need a set cubicle space) and increase productivity (they can work anytime). In this research, we draw from anthropological literature on real nomads, pastoralist nomads, to analyze the unique problems encountered by these mobile employees. The nomadic worker strategy has three foci which are continually carried out to recreate a stable “office”: assembling actants, seeking resources, and integrating with others. A key point is the misunderstanding that satisfying the needs of the micro-mobility of traditional employees in a site will also satisfy the needs of the site's visiting nomadic workers. Currently, we are tying this research into ubiquitous computing.
Community Dimensions of Bloggers
Blogging is an international sensation. We asked in what respect might bloggers be considered a community? To this end, we deployed an international web-based survey in three languages: English, Japanese, and Chinese. We also established a blog to publicly discuss the survey. The survey questions measure four dimensions of community: activism, reputation, social connectedness, and identity. Based on analyses of over 1200 participants, we centered in on two questions:
Do nationality and geographic region affect how bloggers experience community? We did find significant differences between Eastern and Western cultures (e.g., Japanese bloggers more readily hide their true identities). However, due to the small magnitude in differences across most dimensions, we found more evidence that bloggers have a uniform sense of community irrespective of cultural influence. This highlights the necessity to examine whether cultural differences have true/meaningful implications in the context of information technologies.
Do political bloggers represent a different community than other genres of bloggers? Based on our survey results, we discovered that political bloggers have very different goals in using blogs as a means for social interaction by, for example, valuing influence but having less concern for anonymity.
Novel Applications
I have an interest in studying user interfaces in novel domains. I developed the first (to my knowledge) cell phone application to remotely control a desktop GUI. I also implemented a system for encoding/decoding light readings from minute wireless sensor networks into the audio track of a film; thus, one can scrub through a video while dynamically viewing light readings in the locations where the sensors have been scattered. This potentially allows the actuation of camera movements and special effect cues.
